Software Projects
 

        Here's the new promised software section. I have given a brief description of the major software projects I have completed or am doing. In a few days time, I will add links to W. Richard Stevens' sources from his famous books, ported to Linux and FreeBSD. I have included a software resources feature, to provide information about various softwares and packages. If you have any problems or questions, send me email.

• TREASURER: A Cooperative Housing Society Financial Transaction Software. A project in MS-COBOL for the MS-DOS Platform to provide for effective means of financial accounting and maintenance for large housing societies.  This project was written as a Third Year Computer Engineering (T. E.) project for the theory lecture in Data Processing Laboratory (D. P. L.). treasurer.zip.

• HEDIT: A small experimental hacked version of the MS-DOS 6.22 text editor. Pronounced as (h-edit), an experimental text editor, written completely in Intel 8086 assembly language for MS-DOS. This text editor does not support all the options provided by the MS-DOS 6.22 text editor, it also doesn't support mice. Nevertheless, it is small and compact, and good for study purposes, though the design could have been more cleaner and more efficient, especially the file handling part of it.  (Intel syntax, and AT&T syntax).

• PAGING FOR MINIX-2.0.0: A Project to implement paging, virtual memory and the /proc filesystem for the 32-bit Minix-2.0.0 operating system on a base platform of i386 and above. This project entails extensive kernel hacking to provide a Linux-type three-tier paging system to keep the optimal page size limited to 4 kb. The /proc filesystem design is modelled on the /proc filesystem used by UNIX SVR4. (I have put this project on hold due to some unavoidable reasons)

• COMMON INTERNET FILE SYSTEM for the GNU/Hurd Operating System, running on University of Utah's Mach4 microkernel (GNUMach) - An implementation of the Common Internet File System (an offshoot of the SMB file system, widely used in Windows for Workgroups), for the GNU/Hurd operating system servers, running on University of Utah's Mach4 modified microkernel (GNUMach). This CIFS is to be officially merged with the Hurd source distribution. It is an aggressively multithreaded file system, in line with the Hurd philosophy, and conforms to the CIFS-1.0 IETF draft protocol.

• VIKING: A VIRTUAL DISTRIBUTED FILE SYSTEM (VDFS), to provide for transparent file sharing based on the Virtual Cluster Model for Linux, with kernel VFS support. This is a radically new diskless filesystem, that comes with a /proc type VFS support, with attractive features and a fully pageable kernel server running as the arbiter and the logger, using the abstraction of VFS to provide a distributed database. Full crash recovery, node and network failure recovery, support for very large files, secure cross-network transactions, and an added superuser managed GUI tool for managing the filesystem are featured. This filesystem eliminates the risky untrusted client-server communication, and internally uses the trusted cross-node server to server communication method. This filesystem introduces the very essential user configuration part, that is glaringly absent in NFS. Also only those files that are being shared are updated, unlike NFS, in which all files are made available, regardless of their requirement. This filesystem is based on the idea of formation of transparent user defined clusters/groups amongst users that are somehow a part of a system of interconnected homogenous machines, that are formed to provide for distributed sharing of data files. These clusters are defined for the individual process, and a machine can be a part of multiple clusters. Either a provision for a command-line mount utility like "adfsmount" will be provided, or hacks will be written in the "mount" command. First major release of this project will probably be in March 2000.

• GRUB - The GRand Unified Bootloader, conforming to the Multiboot Proposal. These files are directly from Erich Boleyn's website http://www.uruk.org/erich

Some Project Concepts

• Implement a device driver for the SiS display card for Linux.
• Implement integrated threads for Linux **inside the Linux kernel**, with a task-thread relationship as under Mach4. Check out http://www.cs.cmu.edu for info on Mach. This involves tearing up the Linux kernel, and also the libc library, or the glibc library if you are using RedHat-5.0+.
• Implement a multithreaded ext2 filesystem for the Minix operating system. Check out Operating System: D & I by Andy Tanenbaum.
• Implement the NFS filesystem for Minix. Refer to the above book. Implement 'streams' for Linux. This is different from the 'stream' I/O used with files. For more information, check out Dennins M. Ritchie's website at http://www.cm.bell-labs.com.
• Implement Linux-2.2.5 device drivers for the Mach4 operating system. There is some research going out on OSKit, check out http://www.cs.utah.edu if you are interested.
• Implement the Andrew File System (AFS) for Linux. Check out http://www.cs.cmu.edu for more details.
• There is more work to be done with PicoBSD, a strain of BSD. Check out http://www.freebsd.org for more details.
• Some more work has been added to the TODO list of the BSD-Lites Mach operating system. Visit http://www.cs.hut.fi/~jvh to learn more about BSD Lites.
• Implement the ISDN system for the GNU/Hurd operating system.
• Implement Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) for Linux, and change the way Linux does memory management; by implementing the Mach-style Memory Objects concept.

Technical Papers and Seminars

• Ashutosh S. Rajekar, The Microkernel Architecture of Operating System Design, 1999, Postscript. Annual Seminar Reports, year 1999-2000, Pune Institute of Computer Technology, University of Pune.

• Ashutosh S. Rajekar, System calls under Linux and Minix, 1998. (Unpublished)

• Ashutosh S. Rajekar, Nanokernel: A Device driver stub for Operating Systems, 1999, Postscript. (Unpublished)

• Ashutosh S. Rajekar, The /vtmp Diskless File System for Linux: Design and Implementation, 1999, Postscript. (Unpublished)

• Ashutosh S. Rajekar, The Design and Implementation of the Viking File System: A /vtmp Diskless File System for Linux, 1999, Postscript. (Unpublished)

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